Hi. I just tagged on the (abridged) statement in the London Times, usually the reliable voice of Downing St. Here, not so. **And it now appears to be a testing of the waters. Amy Goodman just read a serious critique of both Israel and the U.S. support, delivered by a Brit. government official. I didn't get the name, but it's at the top of the broadcast, which you can catch at 9 AM, PST on kpfk 90.7fm. -Ed
ZNet Commentary An Idea For Media: Cover The War Like A Math Class by Danny Schechter http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2006-07/15schechter.cfm Mediachannel.org New York, New York: There is or used to be a debt clock on New York's 42md Street chronicling the growing national debt, minute by minute, showing how much money Americans owed. That clock is being rebuilt because the people who made it did not allow enough space on it for anything above, 9 billion, 999 million, 99 thousand and 99 cents. With the debt promising to rise above ten trillion, a new digital clock is being readied. If we can cover our economic distress that way, why not the Iraq war? Who will join me in building a War Clock to show the vast amounts of money being pissed away every second in Iraq? Wouldn't this be a feature that every TV newscast could update daily, just as they report on the movements of the stock market? All it would require is a simple graphic. The drama of human beings dying and a country like Iraq being devastated doesn't seem to register on many Americans. Perhaps that's because, as a nation, market logic has subsumed moral logic and nothing matters unless it is quantified. In the world of sports, people with less than elementary school educations mange to remember intricate sports statistics and understand the computation of complex odds behind gambling. In business, and now increasingly in life, the bottom line separates winners from losers. The tickers are everywhere. We all have to memorize complicated numbers just to get by-social security numbers, credit scores. Credit cards, ATM numbers etc, etc. So what about the numbers of war? Do you think most Americans understand what this conflict is costing them not only on lives lost but in what used to be called our "national treasure?" Here's a number most of us don't know: $291,875,368,544. That's the official cost of the war, as I write, according to the national priorities project. They break all of this down on their website: http://nationalpriorities.org It breaks down to $2,629 per household. Which in turn translates into $1,168 per person Those of us here in New York State have coughed up $24,991,439,397 What else could that money have bought? Instead we could have paid for 38,701,306 children to attend a year of Head Start. Instead, we could have insured 174,967,057 children for one year. Instead could have provided 14,164,972 students four-year scholarships at public universities. Instead, we could have built 2,630,942 additional housing units. Instead, we could have hired 5,063,778 additional public school teachers for one year. Now these numbers ,of course, don't cover the costs of the destruction of Iraq or the estimated 250,000 civilians who have died there. It doesn't cover the costs in human life of "coalition Forces" now estimated at 2529. A Casualty Count website http://icasualties.org/oif/ has lots of other numbers about the wounded which may be understated because those shipped "out of country" are not always counted In his book, Imperial crusades Saul Landau describes the Pentagon budget. He writes: "The 2005 defense budget - the word "defense" has become a joke in the post Cold War world - will reach $500 billion (counting the CIA), $50 billion higher than 2004. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the next ten years, the armada of aircraft, ships and killer toys will cost upwards of $770 billion more than Bush's estimate for long-term defense." He also notes, "As Associated Press' Dan Morgan reports (June 12 2004, Tallahassee Democrat), the Pentagon "plans to spend well over $1 trillion in the next decade on an arsenal of futuristic planes, ships and weapons with little direct connection to the Iraq war or the global war on terrorism." And so it goes. Ever upward! There is no bottom line to the bottom line. Much of this is financed not only with taxes but loans from China, Japan and other creditors who will probably never be repaid. Meanwhile, two million Americans went bankrupt last year with many unable to do so because of a bi-partisan supported "Bankruptcy Reform bill. (Interested industries spent $154 million in lobbying for it. Home foreclosures are up. College loans are going up at months end. Credit card debt is strangling millions of American families. The military has been targeted by payday lending scams. The credit squeeze impacts us all. It's only money. Or is it? During the Vietnam war, we used to speak of the choice as guns or butter? Today margarine and other spreads have replaced butter while the social safety net is in shreds and no one-least of all most Democrats-are even talking about the real bill we are all paying for the lack of good schools and health care. It is time for the news to stop using words. Let's only talk in numbers. Make every newscast a math class. Maybe then, Americans will start getting it-and getting rid of the people who are getting them. We celebrate Independence day as a people increasingly dependent on a bad deal that many us don't even recognize. In God We Trust has been replaced by In Debt We Trust. Our flag doesn't run-except in red ink. The bill is coming due. News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org. His new film is about numbers-In Debt We Trust (InDebtWeTrust.com) comments to [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** The Independent July 19, 2006 http://news.independent.co.uk Paradise Lost: Elegy for Beirut by Robert Fisk Elegant buildings lie in ruins. The heady scent of gardenias gives way to the acrid stench of bombed-out oil installations. And everywhere terrified people are scrambling to get out of a city that seems tragically doomed to chaos and destruction. As Beirut - 'the Paris of the East' - is defiled yet again In the year 551, the magnificent, wealthy city of Berytus - headquarters of the imperial East Mediterranean Roman fleet - was struck by a massive earthquake. In its aftermath, the sea withdrew several miles and the survivors - ancestors of the present-day Lebanese - walked out on the sands to loot the long-sunken merchant ships revealed in front of them. That was when a tidal wall higher than a tsunami returned to swamp the city and kill them all. So savagely was the old Beirut damaged that the Emperor Justinian sent gold from Constantinople as compensation to every family left alive. How does this happen to Beirut? For 30 years, I've watched this place die and then rise from the grave and then die again, its apartment blocks pitted with so many bullets they looked like Irish lace, its people massacring each other. I lived here through 15 years of civil war that took 150,000 lives, and two Israeli invasions and years of Israeli bombardments that cost the lives of a further 20,000 of its people. I have seen them armless, legless, headless, knifed, bombed and splashed across the walls of houses. Yet they are a fine, educated, moral people whose generosity amazes every foreigner, whose gentleness puts any Westerner to shame, and whose suffering we almost always ignore. They look like us, the people of Beirut. They have light-coloured skin and speak beautiful English and French. They travel the world. Their women are gorgeous and their food exquisite. But what are we saying of their fate today as the Israelis - in some of their cruellest attacks on this city and the surrounding countryside - tear them from their homes, bomb them on river bridges, cut them off from food and water and electricity? We say that they started this latest war, and we compare their appalling casualties - 240 in all of Lebanon by last night - with Israel's 24 dead, as if the figures are the same. And then, most disgraceful of all, we leave the Lebanese to their fate like a diseased people and spend our time evacuating our precious foreigners while tut-tutting about Israel's "disproportionate" response to the capture of its soldiers by Hizbollah. I walked through the deserted city centre of Beirut yesterday and it reminded more than ever of a film lot, a place of dreams too beautiful to last, a phoenix from the ashes of civil war whose plumage was so brightly coloured that it blinded its own people. This part of the city - once a Dresden of ruins - was rebuilt by Rafiq Hariri, the prime minister who was murdered scarcely a mile away on 14 February last year. The wreckage of that bomb blast, an awful precursor to the present war in which his inheritance is being vandalised by the Israelis, still stands beside the Mediterranean, waiting for the last UN investigator to look for clues to the assassination - an investigator who has long ago abandoned this besieged city for the safety of Cyprus. *** The Times of London - Jul 21, 2006 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1071-2279230,00.html The shocking silence from No 10 Blair's tacit support for Israel's grossly disproportionate actions sends the wrong message by Mary Ann Sieghart IT IS A CASE of the Blair that didn't bark. Why hasn't the Prime Minister publicly condemned the Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Gaza? Most British -- and many Israeli -- citizens are horrified when they see the devastation wreaked by Israeli bombings. There were 80 such raids in the early hours of yesterday alone. By late afternoon, some 327 civilians had died in Lebanon, compared with 34 Israelis. Go figure, as they say. If this is a proportionate response, I'm a satsuma. Even the most hardline supporters of Israel, who justifiably point to the country's right to defend itself against attacks from Hezbollah, must by now have come to realise that the "overkill" will have the opposite of its desired effect. For every member of Hezbollah who dies, another ten will be recruited to its cause. The world will be full of sympathy for the benighted residents of Lebanon who had thought, at last, that their country had secured itself a stable, peaceful democratic future. Half a million of them have been forced from their homes because two Israeli soldiers were taken hostage. That hardly looks like justice. Meanwhile, a forgotten war is taking place in Gaza, overshadowed by the bigger one in Lebanon. Since Israel began its hostilities there, three weeks ago, some 110 Palestinians have lost their lives and countless more have been injured, while just one Israeli has died. The civilian infrastructure has been trashed. And all this just as the Hamas Government and the Fatah party had at last agreed on a formula for peace negotiations. What chance of peace now? Mr Blair, by his silence, seems to be endorsing the US line: allow Israel at least another week to take action against Hezbollah before any calls for a ceasefire are made. He would doubtless argue that, unless he is supportive of the Israelis publicly, he will have no traction with them privately. Yet there are two big problems with this approach. First, the UK has little traction with Israel anyway. Mr Blair had a frank private conversation with the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, when he visited Britain last month. It doesn't seem to have done much good. Secondly, and more importantly, Mr Blair's silence is sending a strong message to the world's -- and particularly Britain's -- Muslim community. By failing to condemn Israel's overreaction, he is allying himself with those acts. What more powerful ammunition could there be for the radicalisers of Britain's young Muslims? "Your Government doesn't care about you and your fellow believers. You need to take action to defend them in this noble cause." It is a terrifying prospect. Mr Blair is endangering our nation's internal security by his reluctance to move a millimetre from the US stance. Even if he is engaging in private diplomacy with Israel, it is not without serious costs to the rest of us. Long after he leaves government, we may be paying the price. --- Dear Advocate of a Just Foreign Policy, Representative Kucinich has introduced a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon. The resolution has more than 20 cosponsors. To ask your representative to cosponsor, you can use the following link: http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/justforeignpolicy.org/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=4697 To see the list of current cosponsors, you can use this link: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:HC00450:@@@P Robert Naiman Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> See what's inside the new Yahoo! 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